Tired of reporting on explosions unprevented by the
Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
just issued a damning set of recommendations
to PHMSA, plus to an alphabet soup of other organizations to ride herd
on PHMSA to try to get some improvement.
How about instead we stop building new pipelines and get on with solar power?

“…we have a moral obligation to leave our children and grandchildren with an earth as safe, beautiful, and majestic as the one bequeathed to us by our parents and grandparents.”

For all these reasons, on behalf of my constituents and the citizens of Lowndes County and the state of Georgia, I oppose the Sabal Trail pipeline anywhere in the County of Lowndes or the State of Georgia.

I urge that FERC reject any permit for the Sabal Trail pipeline, or at the very least move it entirely out of the State of Georgia.

Second day in a row,
the Albany Herald covered
the Sabal Trail fracked methane pipeline making the Georgia
Water Coalition Dirty Dozen list.
The Flint River would be affected just like the Withlacoochee River,
and in Florida the Suwannee River and the Santa Fe River are in the same
karst limestone that contains our drinking water in south Georgia and
Florida in the Floridan Aquifer.
These newspaper articles follow two previous Albany ones, a couple of
Valdosta ones, and local, state, and national TV and newspaper coverage
of protests and opposition to Spectra’s hazardous boondoggle.
Sabal Trail’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad PR week continues….

Usually it’s pipelines that explode, but 20 firetrucks rushed to
a methane power plant in Didcot, Oxon, tonight.
Somebody remind me: why are we building more of these when
solar power is cheaper, faster, cleaner, and never leaks or explodes?

A third explosion in Missouri on Panhandle Eastern’s 200 Line in six years.
Panhandle is the
parent company of Florida Gas Transmission (FGT),
famous for throwing a pipe across the Florida Turnpike in 2009, near a high school.

A 30-inch pipeline explosion was visible 30 miles away.
The 36-inch Sabal Trail pipeline would carry 44% more fracked methane
than that Panhandle Eastern Pipeline Company Line 400,
and could be even more destructive.
“The most intense, scared feeling I’ve ever felt in my life,”
said one witness.

Not in a High Consequence Area (HCA)?
Then a pipeline explosion may not even rate pictures on the news,
even if your house or field or forest or river is what explodes.
That’s what happened near Pilot Grove, Missouri 25 August 2008
on the Panhandle Eastern Pipeline 200 Line.

PHMSA, the so-called Pipeline and Hazardous Materials and Safety Administration,
doesn’t actually know when the
“impressed curent cathodic protection system”
was energized,
and doesn’t have the results of the last hydrostatic test,
which was in 1955, 53 years before the pipeline corroded until it exploded.
PHMSA’s
Administrator just resigned,
after continuing to let pipeline companies
set the very definitions of accidents.
Do you want to trust your air, water, property values, or safety
to such an industry or such an agency?

Another Panhandle Eastern pipeline in the area ruptured on Aug. 25,
2008, near Pilot Grove in Cooper County and caused $1,046,359 in
damages, according to a company pipeline failure investigation
report.